What Would You Do?

John Quiñones would like to know.

What Would You Do? (also known as Primetime: What Would You Do?) is a hidden camera show that airs on ABC in the United States. The premise is, take a current hot-button issue, have actors play it out in public, and see if anyone steps in to help.

Unlike most other hidden camera shows, however, this one is produced by ABC's news division, and is hosted by journalist John Quiñones. Comedy is not the name of the game here, and the show is instead more of a sociological experiment.

Not to be confused with the early-90s Nickelodeon game show What Would You Do?.

Tropes used in What Would You Do? include:

• Bad Boss: One segment took a page out of The Devil Wears Prada and featured a fashionista berating her poor assistant at a New York bistro. The fashionista got called out quite a bit for her bad behavior.
• Berserk Button: The marks tend to really hate seeing service workers getting mistreated by the actors.
• Both Sides Have a Point: Very unusual for this show, as most scenarios are set up with a clearly defined morality problem. However, one scenario focused on a pregnant teenager's decision to keep her child, and the adoptive parents-to-be who became distraught over the girl's decision. WWYD didn't explicitly side with either party.
  • In the scenario dealing with an extreme couponer in a supermarket who ends up holding up the line for over 20 minutes (including leaving the line and coming back with more items that she has coupons for), the show concedes that while it is perfectly okay to use all the coupons you want, it is not okay to piss people off by holding up the line.
• Bratty Half-Pint: The focus of one scenario. The producers set up shop in a diner, gave the child actors Nerf guns (among other things), and told the kids to go nuts.
• Catch Phrase: "Why--" (or "Why not") "--get involved?"
• Coming Out Story: This is a scenario that WWYD explores quite often, since it's a current hot-button issue in the USA, and WWYD typically uses it whenever they visit other cities. They also mix it up a bit: usually they play it with a child coming out to a parent, but they've also done it with a parent coming out to a child, a wife/fiancée/girlfriend coming out to her husband/fiancé/boyfriend, or vice versa. Usually it's played with the recepient of the Word of Gay freaking out, in order to elicit reactions from people.
• Conspicuously Light Patch: A variation. Most of the time in crowd shots, people whose faces are not obscured are usually people who will be interviewed about their action (or lack thereof).
• Crazy Prepared: Justified. Whenever WWYD stages a scenario, they keep a security guy nearby to keep the actors safe, and they inform emergency services ahead of time just in case someone calls 911 (which people have).
• Date Rape Averted: Very often, people don't let the drugged/drunk/intoxicated girl walk away with the obviously less-than-unsavory fellow who has made it apparent that he's got one thing on his mind.
  • Somewhat averted in one scenario, in which a man spikes his date's drink in a crowded bar. Many people saw it, but only two confronted the guy straight up, while others only spoke up after the woman started to complain either of sudden illness or the drink's taste. Those people took action by telling her not to drink from her glass, buying her another drink, and/or giving advice not to drink something left unattended, but never saying that he spiked it.
  • Fully averted in one scenario where someone witnessed the spiking but said nothing. When the actress started to feign feeling ill, and the actor playing the guy wanted to take her to his home, The Mark got up and left (only telling another patron the guy was "cheating" before leaving). When the camera crew caught up to the mark, he refused to speak to them.
  • The gender flipped version is shown as well. Men were quite reluctant to inform a man if a woman put something in his drink.
  • One episode featured a teenage boy borrowing a roofie from a friend in order to use it on a girl. There were several interventions, and in one instance, a nearby off-duty police officer flashed his badge and gave the lad a stern warning.
• Deconstructed Trope: Sometimes WWYD will cite a popular movie or TV show's use of a certain situation, then will go on to show how serious said situation would be in the real world.
• Distracted by the Sexy: One episode dealt with bike thefts. A Caucasian male in his twenties was stopped. An African-American male in his twenties was stopped. A buxom blonde in her twenties got guys to help her.
• Eagle Land: For one scenario, they placed a Type 2 couple in France to test the snooty French stereotype. Aside from some eyerolls and ugly American comments, no French people spoke up--instead, it was another American tourist that called them out.
  • Some of the French people actually found them funny as opposed to obnoxious.
• Early Installment Weirdness: Back when the show was a recurring Primetime special, a few WWYD scenarios seemed a lot more like straight-up Candid Camera Pranks. Take, for instance, the Five Millionth Customer scenario, or the Rude American Tourists scenario.
• Education Mama: One scenario was focused around a mother publicly berating her child for getting an A minus. People around them were put off by this.
• Enforced Method Acting: Sometimes, an actor playing in a scenario will be profoundly moved by people getting involved, and will have a cry while still in character. One notable incident was when a waiter berated a lesbian couple in front of their children and a fellow restaurant patron later approached the couple with a lengthy handwritten letter. One of the actresses was herself a lesbian parent.
• Everything Is Big in Texas: The show had one episode in which they took a bunch of previous scenarios (such as a waitress berating gay parents in a restaurant) and watched how they played out in the Dallas area to see if they would turn out differently from in the North. Yes, a few mark reactions had conservative and faith-based bents, and nearly all reactions followed the "be good to others" Aesop that WWYD enjoys showcasing.
  • Interestingly, the show noted that more Texans spoke out against the waitress berating gay parents than people did in the North. One guy even invoked and paraphrased Jesus to the waitress, telling her, "Don't judge."
  • However, the episode's Idiosyncratic Wipes fully invoked Texas stereotypes, including cattle brands, star-shaped tin sheriff badges, cowboy boots, and Western-style fonts.
• Evil Albino: Mentioned by Quiñones in the introduction to a segment dealing with two guys bullying an albino man. Albinos in The Da Vinci Code and The Matrix Reloaded were cited as examples.
• 419 Scam: The focus of one scenario, except tweaked a bit so that it played out via a very public Skype conversation in a New Jersey coffeehouse.
• Fourth Wall Mail Slot: The WWYD crew did a special that was based on viewer submissions, entitled How Would You Do It?
• Friday Night Death Slot: That's where it sits right now, although it seems to be doing pretty good for the time being.
• Girl-On-Girl Is Hot: Played with during one scenario featuring gay couples kissing in public. When two guys made out, there were abundant protests, including a 911 call and police response (the officer did not know the show had been cleared and got the informing call just as he approached the pair). When it was a female couple, however, there were some protests, but much less than with the guys, and a LOT more male staring. When a group of businessmen were questioned afterwards, they admitted that this trope came into play.
• Gold Digger: One episode had a twentysomething blonde girl canoodling with an elderly man in a bar. It was made quite obvious to the bar patrons that the girl was only in it for the money, and aside from a few odd stares, very few people spoke up.
  • They repeated the scenario with a Gender Flip: young guy, old lady. Again, it got a few stares, but not really any straightforward intervening.
• Hey, It's That Place!: Watch the show long enough and you'll notice that they repeatedly use a few of the same neighborhoods and businesses in the Connecticut/New York/New Jersey area. So far, no marks have noticed, but one wonders when they're going to start.
• Improv: Aside from some background information and some general guidelines on how to act, the actors do the scenarios completely in improv.
• Jerkass: For some scenarios, the actors have to play them.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: Some scenarios involve actors playing an interracial couple getting harassed by other actors.
• The Mark: Most often, it's just some random passersby rather than anyone specific. Although on some occasions they center a scenario on one specific person or group.
• Mean Character, Nice Actor: During the reveal, it's not uncommon to see the Mark be a little unnerved while shaking hands with the friendly actor who was a complete Jerkass just minutes ago.
• Nice to the Waiter: The actors being mean to waiters, nannies, or supermarket checkout clerks with Down Syndrome tends to be a major Berserk Button for the marks.
• Once an Episode: In nearly every episode, there's always at least one person who ends up unintentionally lampshading a scenario by saying something along the lines of, "I feel like I'm on that show What Would You Do? right now!"
• Panty Thief: They set this one up in a laundromat, and had a male actor take panties from a WWYD actress' dryer. And it seriously pissed off several laundromat patrons.
• Parental Favoritism: This was done at a clothing store in Merrick, New York. It got quite a few emotional reactions from passersby, including an impassioned Reason You Suck Speech to the favoritist mother from a teacher moved to tears.
• Playing Drunk: The actors do this with scenarios that deal with public drunkenness. And they do it very well.
• Precision F-Strike: More often than not, people will drop F bombs while interceding in a tense situation.
• Race Lift: Zig-zagged. They'll run a scenario with a person/group of one race, then they'll run it again with a person/group of another, in order to see if reactions differ.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: The marks who do get involved often deliver one.
• Reality Subtext: Some of the actors and actresses talk to Quiñones about how they've dealt with the scenario themselves in Real Life.
• Refuge in Audacity: At one point during the Bratty Half-Pint scenario listed above, they had the actress playing their mother get up and leave the kids to take a phone call. One of the marks later lampshaded it, saying it was too ridiculous.
• The Reveal: "Hi, I'm John Quiñones, and this has all been a part of a TV show called What Would You Do?..."
• Ripped from the Headlines: Many scenarios have this. It was notable in an episode that had actors playing a polygamous family similar to those from the real life FLDS controversy in Texas.
• Rousseau Was Right: The show likes to showcase when this trope is played straight, but it has its share of subversions, too.
• Special Guest: Dr. Mehmet Oz appeared in one episode.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The intros to segments often include original music in the background meant to mimic that of a song related to the scenario. For example, the background music in a segment on a waiter serving food that fell on the floor is similar to (of all songs) Cee Lo Green's "F*** You".
• Take That, Critics!: Quiñones started an episode by playing an angry voicemail from a female viewer in Arizona ^[1] , which told the reporter to "go back to Mexico." Quiñones, who is actually a seventh generation American citizen, took the crew to a restaurant on the Arizona/Mexico border and recorded people coming to the defense of undercover actors (and an undercover Quiñones himself) being racially profiled by a Caucasian actor. At the end of the segment, they played back the voicemail and contrasted it with the footage of the Arizonan Good Samaritans, and the rhetoric seemed to convey a huge "screw you" to the naysayer.
• Teens Are Monsters / Kids Are Cruel: WWYD has had quite a few scenarios revolving around these.
• Teen Pregnancy: A recurring backdrop for scenarios.
• Title Drop: Typically, Quiñones asks the question before introducing a segment, but it also happened in the middle of the aforementioned 419 Scam scenario:

The Mark: I can't tell you what to do, but I wouldn't do it...
Actress: What would you do?

• The Unfair Sex: Happens quite a bit, especially when WWYD Gender Flips a scenario. For example, they once had a man yelling at his girlfriend in a park, and subsequently several people called the police. When WWYD reversed it and had the girl yell at her boyfriend, most passersby chuckled and assumed he had it coming.
  • This very example is used to prop up deconstructions of Abuse Is Okay When It Is Female On Male. The man just had to yell at the woman to elicit response. After the Gender Flip, the woman ended up beating the man over the head with a newspaper, and even then the only people who did anything were a group of female joggers, who gave the woman a warning and secretly hung back to see if she followed. When she started hitting him again, they called the cops.
    • Disturbingly, another woman called the abusive actress a "role model" for women.
• Utah: One episode was set in Utah, where some scenrios were played once more.
• What You Are in the Dark: The show will often interview various people off the street on what they would do in a certain situation, then contrast it to with what other people actually do when witnessing the situation on hidden camera.
• You Look Familiar: They tend to reuse several of their actors.
  • Notably an actress named Traci Hovel, who appears in several roles that require an average woman in her thirties (her roles have ranged from beleaguered waitress to supermarket con artist to lazy EMT).
    • Sharp-eyed viewers might notice that Traci occasionally gets Demoted to Extra whenever WWYD runs scenarios in restaurants or stores, and in those cases she usually takes on the minor role of clerk or waitress (or even fellow patron) just in case a customer needs someone to vent to. And from the looks of things, the poor woman actually works the job itself for the day.
  • Ditto for a recurring actor named Jeremy Holm, who like Traci participates in a wide range of scenarios, and frequently takes on a waiter role. Quiñones mentioned in one narration that Jeremy works as a waiter in Real Life whenever he doesn't have an acting job.
  • Quiñones lampshades the trope in one episode, when he identifies one actor playing an anti-Semitic store clerk as having played a racist clerk in two other WWYD scenarios.
  • Taken to ridiculous levels in the Utah episode, where an info pop-up on the bottom of the screen points out that this is the 17th time the actor playing the abusive husband/boyfriend has played a villain in such a scenario.

1. ↑ regarding a previous segment that featured racial profiling against Latinos